It's Autumn Again

And Urakaze's back. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)  

Investigating Transition Behavior in Movie Sprites

TL;DR:

It doesn't work like what you'd usually do with 2D sprites:

show testchar uniform neutral with dissolve
show testchar uniform smiling with dissolve

The MSC works by automatically playing a set idle animation after playing an "active" animation, e.g. winking to idle. A tested fix (and still testing) looks like this:

ms_pause = Pause(0.5)
ms_dissolve = Dissolve(0.5)

renpy.show(ani_action, at_list=[location])
renpy.with_statement(transition, always=True)
renpy.pause(delay=ani_len)
renpy.show(ani_idle)
#renpy.with_statement(ms_pause, always=True)
#renpy.with_statement(ms_dissolve, always=True)

But no... it didn't work as planned. It seems in order to achieve a smooth transition between active and idle states is ending the active animation smoothly, not abruptly. A good example of this in the MSC code is "epsilon wink_png". 

I'll try to test some more transition classes, particularly the MultipleTransition class. The next update will feature refined code and PEP8 convention because standards.


TL:DRs aren't supposed to be placed at the start of your post fam. 

Hi /evn/!

I need a new ISP if I want to stay in the loop.

/evn/ is 4chan /vg/'s general for English Visual Novels (EVN) or some would call it OELVN. Welp. I get jumpy when somebody mentions me or my projects but then I can't really reply right away since I need to appeal every fucking time.

Meanwhile, at KanColle

I'd probably choose Yamashiro this time. Oh wait, it's always been Yamashiro lol.

I'd buy one.

Shiratsuyu's back with her summer outfit.  

What the fuck am I doing with my spare time?

When You Play Your Genre

When you're fresh off of steam and just brought the Wargame bundle. 30+ hours in and I'm already unproductive as fuck, to the point of disregarding my KanMusus. Also, with Yoku's return, the gamedev life might start again for me. @.@ Welp. Funny thing is I kinda wasted funds for all my projects on waifus, food, glasses, some appliances, Steam games.

Fucking A.

Hey, It's a KanColle Post!

KanColle's most dignified, studious, diligent honor student destroyer finally gets her own kai ni, Asashio. Asashio is the third ship in her class to receive a second upgrade. Like Ooshio and Kasumi before her, she gets two versions, the first version which is the one shown, is centered on firepower, while the other upgrade is more on anti-aircraft.

She actually doesn't come with any equipment. 10cm HAs and Type-13 Kai are from stocks.

It was a good day to keep this class of destroyers. It's a year and a month since I started playing KanColle. Asashio is the 61st ship I padlocked, and I never expected any of her class to have second upgrades before they're relatively newer ships compared to the Mutsuki and Fubuki classes.

Asashio's KanColle profile

Wikipedia article on Asashio

PEP8: What now?

First part of rewriting Sheepstorm is complete. The first part was actually just migrating from the usual # comments in Ren'Py to the prescribed """ blocks inside python blocks. 

Funny thing is I did in during work hours. Somebody's incompetence actually has benefits, like seriously, my coworker didn't report today as some sort of labor strike against the most incompetent tech support staff he had seen in his entire life. It takes them a week to look at an obvious hardware problem but what to they do? Just look the fuck at it. No recommendations whatsoever. What? Will it take another week to replace the PC itself? Jesus, takes them forever to fucking replace a mouse. F-O-R-E-V-E-R.

Well, as long as this coworker of mine isn't done with his part of the system we're developing, I'm free as fuck. So I went ahead and installed Ren'Py at my workstation and it fucking worked. Filthy techies can't even get their admin rights correctly. 

Also, I keep getting banned at 4chan for my ISP's constant use of proxy caches. Well, for those who are waiting for Sheepstorm 1.0, feel free to comment here or send me an email via the contact form to the right of this screen.

Next part of the PEP8 problem would be renaming variables and functions to conform with conventions. Geez, I just love conforming, it makes the world so much easier for almost everyone. Ayy lmao.

Dead Yet Again

R.I.P Circle Cosine.  Thank you, dearest artist for not going through our deals just because we failed your personal favor of bringing you UCC coffee.

Also, thank you, local community for being full of flakes.

The only true victor here is Capitalism, for it allows us to make up what we don't have through money.

Fucking Done

Die motherfucker.

Got my drunken Italian CA now. I need not do anything 

except farming for Akizuki.

Who cares about Iowa. Should I? E-6 is fucking complex but is rather

easy with land-based aerial support available... but fuck it. That comes after I get 

Akizuki.

Some people became salty enough to the point that they can preserve themselves. This might be my last KanColle Event, then hopefully I can focus on my game projects.

Rekt

Exorcising demons have never been this fun, especially at night.

This was probably the easiest medium run ever in my admiralty career.  Gonna start hitting deep operations tomorrow. *Sigh*

Standardization Exchange

Squall Systems will now take care of all templates created under Project Rothera. The said templates will also undergo an update following discussions with Circle Cosine. The goal is to create the following templates:

1.) Character Design Template
2.) School Uniform Template
3.) Map Templates (Icon and scale stuff I guess)
4.) Game Design Document Template

The aforementioned templates might be released as "safe" versions for local community use.

LSF Sprite Study Results

Raw data is available right here.

Ever wondered what's the average cost of commissioning a sprite at LSF and what assets it contains? Don't worry. Squall Systems has you covered (for now). 

Too lazy to explain things by the way so I'm leaving a screenshot instead.

*Note: Median is the middlemost value of a sorted data set. 

I guess the table speaks for itself except the adjustments section. Well, most threads didn't explicitly name prices for additional assets so it'd be shitty to divide it by the sample size (100). Out of 100, 76 posted prices for additional expressions, 57 for poses, and 61 for outfits. 

It's easy to notice that most artists treat a new pose as a different sprite though, but I didn't assume that because... just because. Jesus I need to review my statistics subject.

Well, I hope this helps you plan how much you should expect to spend and get if you don't have a particular artist in mind.

Fucking A: Why ban surveys at LSF again?

Ah, when there's one easy way to do research other than going by threads one by one to gather information.

11.) Poll-Like Threads
Poll-like threads are open-ended threads that ask a user for their personal opinion, without requiring that they justify that opinion.

The administration asks that you not post poll-like threads on the Lemma Soft Forum. When such a thread is posted, we will change, edit, or lock it as we deem appropriate, to ensure that polls do not take the place of discussion. There may be exceptions for "get to know your fellow forum members" type threads.

I'm doing  a "market research" of sorts, trying to determine the following:

Average price for a base sprite per commission (1 pose, 1 outfit)
Average number of expressions per commission

Average cost of an additional expression
Average cost of an additional pose
Average cost of an additional outfit

Average package, meaning how many expressions, poses, outfit per commission.

It would be easy if it were allowable to post a poll-like topic but no.  Maybe I can if I phrase it cleverly enough.  Not to mention there are multiple "how much should I charge" threads in the forums itself.

This probably isn't enough to vent my frustration.

In hindsight, I realized that surveys aren't necessarily polls. Case in point, the LSF demographics survey.

Using Ren'Py's Movie Sprites Ft. Live2D, Part 1 and Part 2

You can read about movie sprites here. It's basically a movie object treated as an image.  Sorry if I confused you even further.

In this discussion, I used Live2D to produce a 2.5D animated object, (which is actually just another 2D movie, sadly).

Part 0: Things to consider/install
-Live2D and Quicktime 7
-Your Live2D models and animations (motions) and expressions.
-FFmpeg, which is kind of tricky to install.


Part 1: Prepping your Live2D model for use in Ren'Py

Skipping the texture mapping and the animating part.  Once you've saved your animations as scenes:

1. Go to File>Export>Still Image (Sequential Number).  It should look like this once it's done exporting:

2. Now, for the .png to .webm conversion.  We are going to do this twice, the second time is for the alpha mask.  But first, do the following:

-open a command prompt

-change the current directory to where the .pngs are stored

-test ffmpeg with "ffmpeg -version" command

-input the following command:

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i epsilon-idle_%3d.png epsilon-idle.webm

%3d.png  = triple-digit numbers.png, if it's 4 digits e.g. epsilon-idle_0000.png, then it's epsilon-idle_%4d.png

epsilon-idle.webm = output video

-press enter and watch it convert the .pngs to a webm.

-for the alphamask, input the following code in the same command prompt:

ffmpeg -r 30 -i epsilon-idle_%3d.png -filter:v alphaextract epsilon-idle_mask.webm

And we're done with Step 2.  Expected output should be like: 

Actually, we're done with Part 1.

Part 2: Using the .webm file in Ren'Py

1. Okay.  Open your respective Ren'Py project's images folder and place the .webms in there.  Then declare the movie sprites as show above. 

2. Use the movie sprites just like how you would with a normal sprite, with the "show" statement.  As you will notice, the movie sprite will keep on repeating.  I don't know a direct fix for this behavior (maybe there's a repeat=False parameter in there but I don't know) so I made my own fix.  This will be explored in another blog post.  But if you totally can't wait, the components that are to be discussed are right here.

Special thanks to Nyaatrap for the .png to .webm idea, otherwise I'd still be stuck with .gif.  Epsilon Standard is a sample material from Live2D Inc.

 

Squall Systems now on Disqus

I replaced the default blogger comments with Disqus comments so that users can easily keep track of their comments on this blog.

Sheepstorm a.k.a Generic Screen Language-Based Engine Released!

You can get version 5.0 at Itch.IO.  Bug reports and suggestions are welcomed here.

Generic Screen Language-Based Battle Engine for Ren'Py

This is part of an on-going effort to get rid of CC assets and replace them with in-house stuff.  But then I might release this as a CC asset lol.  This is a simple battle engine, perfect for minigames.  As of reporting, I have coded the following features in:

1.) Nothing.

Currently, the engine can only handle one-on-one engagements.  Features to be coded include.

1.) AOE (area-of-effect skills) 
2.) Skill animation (explosions and shit)
3.) Healing/charms/status effect skills

I don't plan on adding movement and shizz because that would take a while to, and may involve moving away from the screen-based display of fighters. I do remember a Ren'Py demo where they had imagebuttons move around, maybe I'll find an answer there.

Welp.  That's all for now.

WHERE THE FLYING FUCK IS THE F R E E D O M?

This is a KanColle Winter 2016 event report.  This is probably the easiest event on easy difficulty.

Three stages, almost one week, and no dent to my fleet's resources whatsoever.  NO FREEDOM SHIP THOUGH.  F R E E D O M IS ABSENT.

  

Got a lot of new kids daughters too.  Welp.

I'm really disappointing USN ships didn't appear this time.  Rumor has it the PSVita version is going to have it first.  Also upcoming is the android version (that's supposedly going to be linked with your online account).

Fleet Rearmament and Modernization Report: Murakumo Kai 2, Ushio Kai 2

Howdy.  Almost an event late, here's Murakumo and Ushio.  They're both special-type destroyers.  Ushio bears the distinction of participating in Pearl Harbor, and out of all the ships that participated in that operation, the only one that survived the war.

I don't know much about Murakumo.

There's speculation that this year's first event (Operation Rei-Go) might have KanColle see it's first ever F R E E D O M ships, as already hinted by that 16-inch Mk.7 Main Gun ranking prize distributed last update.

Also, F R E E D O M fairy is here.  I'm so excited for D E M O C R A C Y to come to this Imperialist, revisionist, all the damn -cist game that is Kantai Collection.

Democracy motherf****ers, do you know it?